From 2000–2025, we can notice significant disparities in scholarly attention among Black poets.
That’s what I noticed when I used ProQuest to tally MA theses and dissertations on several notable Black poets. Here are the numbers of appearances the poets made in those documents:
Langston Hughes — 3,009
Amiri Baraka — 1,335
Claude McKay — 920
Gwendolyn Brooks — 766
Paul Laurence Dunbar — 664
June Jordan — 468
Nikki Giovanni — 459
Sonia Sanchez — 380
Rita Dove — 298 Lucille Clifton — 291
Robert Hayden — 224
As you can see, Langston Hughes, and then Baraka and McKay, exist in categories well above everyone else.
To the extent that Dove, Clifton, and Hayden are among our most widely known and frequently cited Black poets, the numbers also give a sense that dozens of other African American poets likely register much lower on the citation scale. Those of us who study poetry are not especially surprised, because we have long known that many poets receive comparatively limited scholarly engagement.
Still, I appreciate that ProQuest makes it possible to get a quantitative sense of things, including the striking variances among well-known Black poets.
Charting the appearances of Black writers in ProQuest gives me sturdier ground for considering where scholarship is, and is not, moving in the future. If these are the poets that advanced graduate students are focusing on, the numbers serve as a slight preview of the field’s ongoing directions.
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